What’s the world’s scarcest commodity?
Now, during and before the global financial and economic crisis. And for years—probably decades–to come.
Jobs.
Somehow in our rush to fix the stuff that went wrong and caused the financial crash and in our efforts to bring the huge deficits that the financial crisis left us with under control, we seem to have forgotten this. The United States and the economies of the other developed countries of the world weren’t producing enough jobs in the boom years before the crisis.
And right now we’re not even talking about this long-term jobs problem. Are we really going to be satisfied if unemployment creeps down from 10% to 8% and stays there? That’s the “solution” that we’re aiming for?
Let’s at least admit that there is a problem. Then maybe we can figure out how to fix it.
Ready to start?
We all know that the U.S. has a jobs problem now. The official unemployment rate was 9.7% in May. Add in discouraged workers, workers in temporary jobs who would like full time work, and other workers that the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls “marginally attached to the labor force” and the total unemployment rate goes up to 16.6%.
And we all know that the U.S. isn’t the only developed economy with an unemployment problem. In May official unemployment was 20% in Spain. In the first quarter of 2010 the official rate was 9.9% in France. In the United Kingdom it was 8.1% in May. And in each of these cases, just as in the United States, the official rate understates the full unemployment rate. In those countries, for example, the number of “employed” workers in temporary jobs is climbing as a percentage of the workforce.
Of course, we expect unemployment to be high when an economy is coming out of a recession. But we’ve got a jobs problem even discounting the effects of the recession.
First, unemployment is going to stay high even as this recession drags its weary way to a close. Two years from now, the Congressional Budget Office projects, the official unemployment rate in the United States will still be 8%. That’s twice the unemployment rate in 2000.
Second, it looks like the U.S. economy dug a big jobs hole even before the current recession and that the currently stubbornly high rate of unemployment simply makes an existing problem worse.
All partisan politics aside, the administration of George W. Bush had a truly abysmal record of job creation. In eight years in office the Bush administration created just a net 3 million jobs. That record looks especially terrible compared to the 23 million net jobs created during the eight years of the administration of Bill Clinton. The George W. Bush administration’s eight years looks bad even in comparison to the George Herbert Walker Bush administration which managed to create 2.5 million jobs in only four years.
But what’s really important isn’t just the top line number but the huge job hole that the U.S. economy dug during the eight years of the George W. Bush administration. To see the dimensions of that hole look at the relationship between the number of jobs created and population growth. The administration of George W. Bush created a net 3 million jobs during a period when the population grew by 22 million. If you assume a labor force participation to population ratio of something like May 2010’s 58.7% then the economy needed to produce almost 13 million jobs from 2000-2008 when it only got 3 million.
So the United States went into the recently ended recession about 10 million jobs in the hole—and then things got worse. According to data from the Economic Policy Institute, the U.S. lost about 7.4 million jobs since the recession started in December 2007. In that same period, the institute calculates, because of a growing population, the United States needed to add 3 million jobs just to stay even. From the December 2007 start of the recession, the U.S. has dug itself another 10.5 million jobs hole.
Now you can’t just add these two figures together to put the size of the cumulative hole at 20.5 million jobs because part of the two periods overlap and some of the Bush job losses are included in the recession job losses. But I think it’s fair to put the size of the hole somewhere in the vicinity of 15-18 million jobs.
That’s an immense hole. One that even the jobs record of the eight years of the Clinton administration couldn’t fill. The Clinton years saw the creation of a net 23 million new jobs but remember that the population grew during that period too. Using some rough back of the envelope calculations almost 13 million of the Clinton jobs went to keeping even with a growing population. That would leave just 13 million jobs to fill that 15 million to 18 million hole.
There are three good reasons to believe that we’re not going to see anything like the Clinton job creation numbers coming out of the recently ended (I don’t think we’re headed to a double dipper, but that’s not a certainty) recession.
First, the job creation in the Clinton years was an outlier in U.S. history stretching back to the post-World War II Truman administration. In its eight years the Ronald Reagan administration built an extraordinary record on job creation, but that administration still created just 16 million jobs. That’s 7 million short of the Clinton administration record.
Second, all indications are that the current economic recovery is going to be slower than most recoveries from a recession. Job creation is going to get less than its usual cyclical bump.
Third, the global economy seems to be in a period of greater volatility with economic cycles both more extreme and packed more closely together. (For more on the likelihood that we’re going to repeat the current crisis again and again in the next few decades see my post https://jubakpicks.com/2010/05/25/get-used-to-it-the-global-debt-crisis-will-play-out-over-and-over-again-in-the-next-decades/ )
And fourth, I don’t think the Obama administration or the administration that follows after either four or eight years has access to the tools that produced the job growth of the Clinton years. The financial crisis that broke in 2007 made sure of that.
To the degree that the job creation boom of the Clinton years wasn’t simply a matter of being in the right place in the economic cycle, it was built on what has been called the Rubin-Greenspan Understanding.
The terms were pretty simple, Robert Rubin, the Secretary of the Treasury in both Clinton terms, would run a tight fiscal ship that would eventually take the federal budget to a surplus. Even if you discount the contribution to the budget from a surplus in Social Security, the Clinton budget saw a surplus of $86 billion in 2000.
In exchange for that fiscal restraint Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan would keep interest rates low and monetary policy relatively loose. The Fed didn’t cut rates to the bone during these years. For example, the Fed’s target interest rate was over 6% in 2000. But the Fed kept the inflation-adjusted interest rate—the real interest rate—to less than 3% even in 2000. (Inflation that year averaged 3.38%.) And for much of the period the Fed’s real interest rate was much lower than that. For example, in 1993 when inflation averaged 2.96%, the Fed’s target interest in December 1993 was just 2.99%. That’s a real rate of just 0.03%.
Money was cheap. Oh, maybe not compared to right now when the inflation rate is 2% and the Fed’s target interest rate is 0% to 0.25%. But that’s comparing apples and oranges. A real Fed target interest rate well above 0% is plenty cheap for an economy that isn’t being nursed to recovery after the worst downturn since the Great Depression.
Cheap money had its usual effect on the economy. Growth boomed as companies borrowed to expand and as consumers borrowed to consume. Median wages fell during the first half of the decade but by 1996 wages were growing again. By the first quarter of 1999 they were 2% above the level of ten years earlier. The actual increase in wages provided some support for increased consumer borrowing but the direction of wages, which created an expectation for future wage increases, was even more important. Consumers were willing to borrow more because they thought they’d earn more in the future.
This cheap money also led to a stock market bubble that finally burst in March 2000.
The ensuing recession, the Bush administration tax cuts, and the low interest rates engineered by the Federal Reserve to aid in the recovery ended the Rubin-Greenspan Understanding.
It was replaced by an era of extremely low interest rates—the Federal Reserve’s target rate fell to 1% in July 2003, stayed at 1% until July 2004, and didn’t see 3% until May 2005—and a rising Federal budget deficit. The final Bush administration budget for the 2009 fiscal year that would end in September 2009 projected a deficit of $400 billion.
But low interest rates and soaring deficit spending weren’t the end of economic stimulus during these years. Wall Street was pitching in too. From 2000 to mid-2007 Wall Street went on a securitization binge taking debt such as mortgages or credit card receivables and then repackaging it for sale to investors looking for cash flow and income in the form of securitized debt. By mid-2007 the volume of securitized debt had grown to $8 trillion, according to Citigroup. (For more on the growth and collapse of the securitized debt markets see my post https://jubakpicks.com/2010/06/24/could-we-be-looking-at-another-global-credit-crunch-as-central-banks-step-back-from-the-markets/ )
The great puzzle of the Bush administration given all this stimulus and the extremely fast growth in the money supply isn’t why it created a bubble in housing and other asset markets—that bubble and its bursting is exactly what, in retrospect, should have happened as a result of all this stimulus. The real puzzle is why this stimulus didn’t generate faster economic growth or create more jobs. The average annual rate of GDP growth from 2000-2007 was just 2.5%. And the economy created just 375,000 jobs a year, not enough to stay even with population growth.
Given fiscal and monetary policy from 2000-2007, and given that Wall Street was creating new “money” as fast as it was, why didn’t the U.S. economy take off on a wild growth bender? That, and not the crash in 2007, is the real puzzle.
I suspect there are a lot of partial explanations. Growing income inequality in the U.S. slowed wage growth for the huge U.S. middle class. Competition with workers in low-wage emerging economies depressed wages in the United States and assured that some of the jobs that in other times would have been created in the United States were instead created in China, and India, Brazil, and other developing countries. An aging U.S. workforce raised costs for those U.S. industries that were the traditional source of high-paying blue collar jobs to the point where these sectors bled jobs. Even when workers could find replacement jobs, they didn’t pay as well. The luck of the technology cycle resulted in a relative scarcity of new products that rewarded U.S. competitive advantage in design and development. A slowdown in innovation—it happens and no one quite knows why—meant that more products became commodities and that sent profits to manufacturers and assemblers in low-cost economies.
What’s striking to me is that none of these causes alone signals a monumental shift in the playing field away from the United States. And that’s good. It means that these are problems that can be addressed and solved.
But it’s equally clear that these causes have a certain momentum. For example, manufacturing efficiencies in low-cost countries lead, in time, to greater efficiencies and lower costs that don’t depend on low wages. China is going through this transition now. Manufacturer efficiencies and high volumes tend to lead companies to try to move up the value chain by adding new expertise in design or marketing that is more profitable than, say, assembly.
Together this complex of solvable problems does over time amount to a shift in relative economic growth and relative economic advantage of a magnitude that explains why job growth was so slow during the Bush administration and why it will take so long in this recovery to reduce unemployment.
And we’re not doing anything to tackle any of the pieces of this complex. Our plans for recovery seem predicated on fixing the financial system that created the crisis of 2007. That’s worth doing. The debate over what to do after that is focused on how fast to reduce our deficit. That debate is worth having and certainly the deficit needs to be reduced.
But neither fixing the U.S. financial system nor reducing the deficit addresses the job creation problem that existed before this financial crisis broke upon our heads and that will still be with us when the current recovery is celebrating its second or third or fourth anniversary.
And certainly we should know without a doubt that we can’t financially engineer our way to job growth. Been there. Tried that. Didn’t work.
Jobs are the scarcest commodity in our world and we need to make creating more of them a true national priority. If not, the jobs hole will just keep getting bigger.
The Federal government will next report the unemployment rate on Friday, July 2.
jamba, you are dead on! Clinton benefited heavily from the internet/technology boom, which also gave him greater corporate profits to tax. It wasn’t until Clinton’s 2nd term, when the Republicans took the Senate, that Clinton’s spending spree was haulted. The truth is that neither administration did anything to create much in terms of jobs, but I get tired of the blame it on Bush cry. Obama is not doing a damn thing to create jobs either.
Jim wasn’t “giving credit” to anyone. He was stating a fact. The numbers of jobs created in the last several presidential administrations is a matter of public record. The Bush administration created few jobs relatively speaking and large deficits relatively speaking and you can argue all day along about why and whose fault it was but the math doesn’t change.
Why the hyper-sensitivity when anyone recognizes the unimpeachable facts simply because they might not reflect particularly well on the Bush years?
Purewater, doesn’t the gold standard limit growth by limiting the ability to borrow and invest? (that’s not a rhetorical question- I’m not real clear on how the gold standard works.)
One other thing. Hopefully there is a statistition out there, but even if half of the families out there are two income families. That means that the odds of one of them being unemployed or under employed is 50% greater than a family of one income. So we might have a total employment of 16.6% but that means that at least 26% of families now have a significantly reduced income then they did before the recession. Ouch!
another great post Jim and who cares which Dem/Rep prez/Congress got us here. It’s the same old partisan BS when people argued who won the Cold War. But where do we go from here? How do we create jobs? Do we need a WPA/CCC to build the 21st century infrastructure?
Jim, One major driver missed in this discussion I believe. The growth of the two income family during these time periods, where the growth of women in higher paying jobs went from a novelty to the norm. That drove a lot of the middle class growth/spending until it became the new norm. House prices rose to what buyers could afford now that dual incomes drove up what people could spend. That upward spike with low interest rates and easy money, on top of raised family income and two job security caused a “Keep up with the Jones’s” overdrive, and one piled on the other fed on itself until it popped.
Move forward to the present. Now it takes two incomes to afford a house. Both family members have/need a car. Education is more expensive and more necessary for our kids future.
Now we are in an economic downturn where family debt loads have reached their two income maximimum. The loss of one job of two is devistating. The second job is no longer a cash cow, but a necessity. That is why growth going forward will be slower and steadier from here on out….unless something new comes to the fore front to multiply the growth effect. Add to that the tax burden that must come because of the failure of the Bush-Cheney trickle down theory with it’s insane tax cuts while doubling spending and declaring a war they did not prepare to fund, and it will be a longer road ahead. But lets have faith in individual greed that drives the free market. We will find a way to get those new toys we desire, it just may take a little longer.
Thanks for the nickname djpoints. You really prefer talking points and mudslinging instead?
bsdgv and jamba–the way I see it is Reagan started a 30 year Keynesian stimulus era by raising ssn and medicaid, by borrowing more on top of that, and spending it all into the economy. Of course it boomed. Clinton followed the same policy by flipping the debtor from government to private sector in the way Jim described. Bush II was the last hoorah with a combination of both. Now we’re all in debt up to our eyeballs and pointing fingers makes us feel better.
bsdgv
My point is Jim is giving credit to Clinton for the wonderful job he did in job creation, with no credit to what was done by those ahead of him or to a pro-growth congress at the time.. And once again giving Obama a pass by blaming Bush.
If people do not want a discussision on politics then tell Jim to stop writing articles on it.
I’ve worked in Engineering since the 1980’s. The ’80’s is when the MBA degree really started to take off. Companies that in the past had been run by engineers and had ‘engineering cultures’ started to be taken over managerially by MBA types who had no understanding or appreciation of the product creation process and the engineering cultures that created these great products. Where in the past companies balanced the creation of products and return on investment to the shareholders, the balance has become skewed in favor of return on investment to the shareholders.
This has led to slashing workforces (deleting jobs) in order to enhance the bottom and the return on investment to the shareholders.
Along with the slashing of jobs and villainization of the ‘workers’ we’ve seen the decimation of the engineering cultures that created great products. MBA types have no patience and no understanding of the time it takes to create products.
There has no reciprocal villainization of management. When companies slash jobs they slash the actual ‘doers’, the people that actually perform the work, design products, build products, etc and management, especially senior management is untouched. And of course, we’ve seen, even in the event of extreme failure, senior management always walks away with a huge golden cow…I mean parachute…
Since we have fewer and fewer people performing actual work in American corporations, we have fewer products and the products we have are of extremely poor quality. Perhaps this was a purposeful strategy since corporations drive sales by creating demand. If products are of poor quality then people have to buy the same products more often which create more sales. Consumers are tired of this corporate strategy.
I believe that we could really have a booming economy in this country if we could bring back some of the product creation culture that has been lost by so many companies in America. There is so much untapped talent with great ideas but so few ‘do it ‘ type cultures or places that foster product creation and benefits that do along with it, jobs, booming economy, etc.
Hence block buster companies like Google, the modern day version of Bell Labs which fosters engineering culture and innovation keeps growing and growing and adding new innovative products. Even Apple is starting to get its revenge with great products that mostly just ‘work’. No weird cryptic error messages. Apple has never lost its engineering culture either….
The whole problem of lack of jobs and lack of jobs creation is the result skewing the whole system, economy, etc to profits at any cost with no regard for jobs destroyed. The balance between profits and jobs is destroyed. When jobs are destroyed as they have been systematically, people lives are destroyed in the process and no one has the desire to work for the ‘man’ especially since there is no mutual respect between management and the workers.
With the villainization of the workers, surprise, surprise…no one wants to be a worker any more. Corporations don’t reward the workers, they reward the non workers.
This whole process has been systematically taking place over the last 30 or so years….
I could go on….
Everyone agree with one another, no matter what. ‘Sensitive sigli’ is getting upset once again…oh yeah, and remember sigli always get the last word, no matter what…ughh.
Excellent article Jim!
Ed, Yes I agree with you that governments are capable of ruining any economic system. However, in a gold standard system there is a self-correcting mechanism to deal with irresponsible overspending governments, a run on the banking system where people withdrawal their gold. If that happens, the economic growth will slow significantly, the government will get voted out and a more responsible one will be put in place.
Regardless, that’s not what this post is about…it’s about creating jobs. My point is a gold standard restricts jobs from moving offshore because it keeps trade in balance.
Despite the length of this post, Jim did not address the root cause of the joblessness in this country. Jim lauded Rubin-Greenspan’s monetary and fiscal policies, but did not explaine why equally easy and friendly Geithner-Bernanke policies did not produce much jobs at all. I’d look into it from the economic basic, supply and demand.
Supply. I posted couple of times before on this blog that the planet seems short of everything except labor. Look around. It’s nothing but cheap labor and it grows very fast. I hate to say it that you can easily find 4 billion people who would not mind to work for much less. This enormous pool of cheap labor not only encourages developed countries to shift jobs to cheaper places, but also encourages people in developing countries to migrate and further add labor supply in developed countries. And for some reason, population tends to multiply faster in more densely populated and less developed demographics. The labor supply is endless.
Demand. The demand for labor gets smaller not only because the supply of labor gets bigger much faster but also because business environment gets much worse and makes it much harder to create jobs. It gets much harder for existing businesses (big and small) to create jobs and it gets even harder for anyone to create new businesses.
Couple of examples. Businesses (big and small) are being asked to perform many government duties without being compensated such as collect taxes, enforce child support, fight money launderings, enforce immigration laws, on and on. To my knowledge, the Japanese, Chinese and Korean companies don’t have to do these. All these add to the BURDEN of doing business in America. I am not saying these things are not good. I am simply saying that businesses spend enormous amount of resource on these government-imposed duties but not get any compensation for it. It’s tremendous BURDEN.
Meanwhile, over the past couple of decades, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commissions, the Workers Safety Commissions, Labor Dept. and EPA all grow enormously powerful and they are all “boots” on the necks of businesses as some proud government official would say. Remember the current Labor Secretary’s first massage to American businesses when she came to power was “there is a new sharif in town!”
In addition to IRS audits, businesses are now also subject to ICE audits. And don’t be surprised if your company gets audits from EPA, DEA, ATF either. (I know a company which is not a migrant labor user got ICE audit. The result, of course, is no illegal was found.) All these government agencies have ABSOLUTE power, business must make every efforts (no matter how costly it may be) to comply. Any damages caused during the process are sole businesses’ to bare.
Let also don’t forget the traditional permit and inspection departments and the unemployment department in your local governments which are live and well in catching every businesses’ “fall”. And the laws and rules got so complex, none knows exactly what they are! If you want to start a business, you can easily and quickly violate many of them! In addition to government regulations, the threat of law suits. Now even newer thread to businesses, criminal prosecutions (think BP). All are going to chase the businesses out of this country.
It’s important to remember that (1) Clinton had a Republican congress to put break on his social spendings. (2) job out-sourcing had not become widely practiced during Clinton years. Meanwhile, jobs out-sourcing which, I believe, caused not only by the desire for cheap labor but also all above mentioned business environment changes may have contributed to the low job creation during the Bush years. In other words, decades of government expansion has finally showed significant effects during the Bush years and beyond.
Mark down my words, the jobs creation will not improve over the long term. It may have some short term boost every now and then.
Domino:
> No wonder we have all these single moms with five or six kids, living on welfare.
Tell this to all those Family Values crowd who bad-mouthed single mothers in 80s and 90s.
jamba:
You are right. Reagan/Bush-I laid the foundation of for the Clinton’s tech boom/bust and Bush-II housing/credit crisis with all the de-regulation, interest/tax rate cuts fot the rich and benefits reductions for low to middle income families. You are right…
southof8,
Definition:
People from other countries can be classified by the minority status and have become american citizens
You can always count on an employment discussion to bring out a general display of stupidity, altogether lack of logic or reason, and a complete disregard for accounting identities. Can’t cooler heads prevail for once? Why don’t we leave the talking points out of it.
No mention of Congress – Repub during Clinton and Dem druing Bush.
Purewater,
Without fiscal discipline, the gold standard is no better than fiat currency. How many countries in history started with a gold standard, and proceeded to debase their currency to the point of worthlessness? The gold standard is no panacea for economic health.
For a healthy economy, including job growth, there is only one solution: cut spending and taxes at the same time.
“Legal minorities” are not americans? Enddorfb, are you the dumbest MF on the planet or the grand poohbah of the ku klux klan?
Jim, save me from your followers.
If you want sustainable job growth (the kind without government stimulus, Fed money printing, etc.) the answer is simple: go back to the gold standard. With a gold standard, you can only buy from countries that buy from you and you can only sell to countries that sell to you. It forces a balance in the trade system.
In the current fiat system, an unlimited amount of credit can be produced to buy products which means an unlimited amount of our industry can move offshore, to cheaper labor countries. Which is exactly what has happened.
Anyone care to argue against that? Would like to hear your view…
Excellent Article! It’s not only job creation which is a problem, but more importantly is the fact that we have wage shrinkage! I worked in manufacturing management for years and in 92- to 99, the avearge unskilled labor wage paid 9 to 12 bucks an hour. Not bad for no marketable skills, keep in mind low insurance rates, gas at .87 a gallon, low utilities, housing, etc. Folks could raise a family and live decently enough. Now, 12 years later that same job ( if it’s still here) pays 7.50 to 9, temp work at best and no benefits! And everything else has doubled or tripled. Folks cant survive on that. No wonder we have all these single moms with five or six kids, living on welfare. I’m in TN, by the way.
Back to China…
Any thoughts on Baidu (BIDU)? With all the problems Google is having in China, BIDU is the logical beneficiary. Also, BIDU’s ROI has been quite impressive since 2006, and they still have more market share they can grab. Granted, the stock is already heavily overpriced with these factors (P/E of 99+), but they have exceeded analyst’s EPS estimates the last 5 quarters (maybe longer, but that’s as far as I checked).
Even as the Chinese markets have been tanking, BIDU has appreciated nicely. With the markets tanking today, I am thinking BIDU could be a buy in the near future.
Jim,
Don’t you think that the Clinton adm. greatly benefited from the work done by Reagan/Bush before him. They laid the groundwork economically and also politically by the collapse of the Soviets, the so called Peace dividend. Also you had in the 90’s the Tech revolution. Everyone got personal computers, internet exploded, cell phones and Y2K which produced lots of high paying jobs. When 2000 came around this growth producing engine was winding down. I know lots of friends who never found tech jobs after Y2K.
I think Clinton benefited more from these things then by being some great economic mind.
Completely off topic. Jim What is the return on STD? On Yahoo quotes it is 4.7% ON Merrill Lynch it is 5.73. I though it was around 10-11%
A chart worth looking at:
http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-bush-policies-deficits-2010-6
It’s my belief that the economic policies after 2000 exaserbated the effects of globalization. We moved toward a greater disparity between rich and poor at a time when there were already pressures in this direction. Greenspan was out there saying budget surpluses were dangerous. A lot of our investment went to foreign countries, further enhancing the effect. Now, we can see that the great tax cuts were borrowed money, collecting interest, and need to be paid back somehow.
There’s this push-back on “Blame it on Bush” being passe; after all, Obama is president now, and all he is doing is spending monery.
Well, spending money is what is needed, but because of the history that has gone down, we think that option is limited. I look back at WWII and think what happened in the fifties? It worked then.
Jim,
Do you write speeches for Obama?
I’m been searching and searching for a discussion on the shrinking workforce participation rate that has happened since 2000. The rate went upward from 1964 (58.7%) to 2000 (67.1), stalled, then headed down ever since (64.8% in May, 2010).
Why isn’t anyone talking about this? Liberals keep saying we should enjoy the more important things in life besides work, work, work and consume to no end, and conservatives decry the shrinking traditional household. Maybe both are simply getting what they called for and jobs are shrinking as people fall out of the work force. After all, participation rate cannot go up forever. Was it the Bush era, or was it a natural reversal in this 40 year trend?
To create jobs we need people to take jobs. Jobs feed off of jobs. If people work and produce less then costs go up while incomes shrink. Maybe we don’t need any boogey politicians or policies to blame. Maybe it’s just a natural flow.
I’d really love pointers if anyone has explored this already.
endorfb,
Lots of people want to do blue collar work. I know dozens of them from when I worked in the auto industry. The problem is they want to do it for the 20 or 30 dollars per hour they had been making since the eighties. Nobody wants to do blue collar work for the $9/hr corporate America wants to pay. So instead the work goes to Mexico for $3/hr. We need a tariff. No more NAFTA.
yx,
Yes some shifted to Mexico but we have the same problem in our country. The jobs that the illegal and legal minorities are working, not many if any americans want to work those jobs. We were made on industrialization blue collar work, but nobody wants to do that anymore.
Jim,
This post should be linked to by every website on the internet. Sadly, the only ones who seem to recognize our true problem are you, me, and most of the American public.
The politicians are currently MIA on this topic. Republicans can’t demagogue the Democrats with this since the GOP created this problem, and the Democrats are quickly losing their credibility on this topic as every month passes with no significant employment growth (unless you count Census workers, and I don’t).
Part of this problem is the lack of motivation people need to get a job. I would give anything to FIND someone who actually wants to work
Your tax dollar (car bailout) at work: more car jobs shifted to Mexico!
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_27/b4185010570308.htm